


sweeping the dust

by samarqand



Category: Marvel 616, Punisher (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:09:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another epilogue for Henry Russo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sweeping the dust

They say bad men survive at the cost of their soul.

 

That’s the story of what happened to his father: he sucked, and he should’ve quit while he was still sucking, but he kept sucking the next breath in, and the next, and no matter how many times Frank laid him low, he kept trundling back up to his feet.

Bang - down. Breathe. Crash - down. Breathe. Boom - down. He became Lazarus ten times over, dead already but for obsession.

And, thinks Henry, wrapped in his duvet and sending out emails in the early morning, they say in the same breath that the apple never falls far from the tree.

Henry is trying to fall with grace, but he has weaknesses, too.

*

He spends the day in the nonprofit’s cluttered office, wading through dull technicalities with one eye on the window, watching children on their scooters sailing toward school. Busy morning. He peels off identity and becomes a representative for something greater than himself.

Fundraising, personal inquiries, upcoming events. He adjusts well; he feels rewarded.

Then, sneaking breakfast between pamphlet proofreadings. Over an avocado, he swims in memory until it drowns him. It hits him like this, when he lays down the armor. He remembers a different chapter in his story, as though it were a dream.

Cooking for two, cleaning for two, intel for two. 

(Don’t think.)

Frank with his camera, and the way he’d diligently set it on top of Henry’s main monitor when he was finished with it. 

Frank scrubbing so hard at himself in the shower that Henry could hear it. How he scoured himself of color, of scent. Tabula rasa. 

The epilogue is the way Frank always draped the starchy white towel over his head when he left the bathroom in only trousers; he dried his hair every night with an idle docility that Henry wondered about.

 

(Don’t think.) 

He runs out to the grocery down the block during lunchtime to try pumpkin-flavored guacamole, crosses that off his list. Next paycheck, he’ll try the pumpkin pancake syrup. Promises himself.

Outside of the store, he looks over to the right some meters away, and remembers having a terrible argument with Frank through the headsets; he had watched Frank, Frank had been standing right over there.

Bag of groceries in his arms, he takes a few ginger steps. Close. Here. Next to the dumpsters.

Frank had argued in sentences so curt Henry could swear he’d clipped the wings of his own words, didn’t care to let them reach anyone anymore. 

And Henry, he’d hissed Frank’s name like profanity. 

If Frank had asked him, he would’ve talked. He would’ve spilled it all.

He almost lets himself imagine what would happen if he did.

He walks away before he can.

*

Henry does much of the nonprofit’s administrative work himself, even oversees a couple newcomers. He’s ready for responsibility. His supervisors are impressed with this industrious young man. Henry excels at keeping his head down; dotting his i’s; crossing his t’s.

 

He heads straight home in the evening, where sometimes his mother plants a kiss on top of his head, at a loss for how to parent but so proud of the boy who loves her for this, too.

 

Night time is the worst. Henry touches himself thinking of Frank, the way he’d fall asleep after showers with his hair damp and utter exhaustion on his face. Mouth a peaceful, amnesiac line.

Frank would sleep for four hours exactly, but he would sleep through anything; he wouldn’t wake up, even when Henry shook his shoulder, touched his hand, and sometimes, if Henry were brave, the angle of his jaw.

He sat on the bed next to Frank sometimes, mustering courage he knew he couldn’t find just yet, his weight on the cheap cot squeaking his audacity.

Frank slept as though he’d forgotten how to sleep. He rehearsed death instead.

— Stupid, Henry tells himself, recounting every glance Frank gave him down there in their bunker, in their brief, private universe. Stupid.

The way Frank woke up, immediate and peaceful as though he’d only been deep in thought. The way Frank wrote in his war journal. No dreams. Only his story.

The way he’d look over at Henry’s cot to see that Henry was still sleeping, and Henry would always look back at him, awake. He’d always been a light sleeper, always waiting for the next crisis.

 

He listens through the records Frank gave him for messages that may as well be posthumous. 

He sleeps, thinking, that’s one thing he and Frank have in common.

We don’t dream. We don’t do that anymore. We live what we were meant to be.

*

This past year has been slow as a decade.

God’s sake. He told Henry so many small things over dinner, over Henry’s shoulder with his eyes fixed on the the CCTVs.

Henry can’t remember a single word Frank said to him.

It’s 0500 hours. Henry opens his eyes and stares across his dark room, inviting grief in. 

_You’re late._

*

He goes to work, living life block by block, in assured increments. He distracts himself, don’t think, or else he tells himself the story of what happened last week again and again.

Homecoming after the war, it isn’t easy.

That’s why we don’t think about it, Henry says to himself.

Or else we sit and wait by the window, and again tell ourselves the story of how once upon a time,

while cutting into a pear, Henry swiveled his chair around to watch the drizzle outside on the stony streets, and walking into frame across the road was Frank, his hair uncovered and damp, his pace slow, his gaze set.

He looked cold.

And Henry wanted to rap on the window, shout through the glass to pull Frank back, but he knew he was not what Frank was searching for, so he just pressed his forehead to the window and then his hands, too, like he could slip right through the glass and live in the world he saw there.


End file.
